Abstract:

As result of economic uncertainty, rapid technological developments and continuous change, effective organisational transformation is required to ensure a competitive advantage. Transformational leadership is characterised by the ability to bring about significant organisational change. Transformational leadership is visionary-orientated and based on deeply fundamental values. This intrinsic value system which is a dimension of spirituality forms a spiritual foundation that guides and directs leaders' behaviour.
Recognising leadership as the manifestation of a leader's spiritual core has emerged from recent research, but no research studies could be found to confirm the relationship empirically speaking between transformational leadership and spiritual intelligence. Subsequently the aim of this research is to determine the relationship between transformational leadership and spiritual intelligence and how it is manifested in managers of a utility company. A literature study was undertaken to analyse the concepts of transformational leadership, spiritual intelligence and the key dimensions that described them. It leads to the conclusion that spiritual intelligence implies the "capacity to think with one's soul", bringing with it self development that may pre-dispose leaders to use transformational behaviour.
In the empirical study with a group of 56 managers from a utility company, their transformational leadership behaviour and spiritual intelligence levels were assessed by means of self-evaluation via the following measuring instruments: Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) (Kouzes & Posner, 1998) and a Spiritual Intelligence questionnaire developed by Minnaar (2005). Feedback from 97% of the managers of the utility company yields the following results: good reliability indices for measuring instruments, and that a significant meaningful correlation exists between transformational leadership and spiritual intelligence. The results of this study prove a relationship between transformational leadership and spiritual intelligence as manifested amongst managers of a utility company. The contribution of this study is to be found in that research was done on the relationship between two leadership elements, which had not previously been researched.